Operational vs. analytical MDM
.@philsimon chimes in on some oft-overlooked differences.
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The spreadsheet: Friend or foe?
For many years the humble spreadsheet has held many different roles and responsibilities supporting finance, marketing, sales -- pretty much every department in your business. There's always someone with a “magic spreadsheet,” but how effective is this culture that always uses the same format to consume data? My view of
Happy Global Employee Health and Fitness Month!
Each year at SAS, along with companies around the world, we celebrate health and fitness at work and this year is no exception! The Recreation and Fitness Center, Health Care Center, Work/Life Team, the Cafes, our Environmental Sustainability Team, and Research and Development Departments have teamed up to promote whole body
Split data into groups that have the same mean and variance
A frequently asked question on SAS discussion forums concerns randomly assigning units (often patients in a study) to various experimental groups so that each group has approximately the same number of units. This basic problem is easily solved in SAS by using PROC SURVEYSELECT or a DATA step program. A
Autotuning: How machine learning helps optimize itself
Machine learning seems to be the new hot topic these days. Everybody's talking about how machines are beating human players in chess, Jeopardy, and now even Go. In the future, artificial intelligence will drive our cars and our jobs will be taken over by robots. There’s a lot of hype,
Getting Started with SGPLOT - Part 5 - Histograms
This is the 5th installment of the Getting Started series. The audience is the user who is new to the SG Procedures. Experienced users may also find some useful nuggets of information here. A histogram reveals features of the distribution of the analysis variable, such as its skewness and the peak which
Cracking SAS Data Scientist Certification Code
The SAS Data Scientist Credential SAS Data Science Academy brings in a complete set of certifications which enables somebody to be qualified as “Data Scientist”. There is full training support , blended mode of learning , case studies, projects and practice exams by the academy. By successfully passing certification exams,
Taking risk management to a wider audience within the business
Organizations of all kinds operate in uncertain environments with challenging natural, political, socio-economic and cultural influences. These influences may affect their ability to meet their objectives. The uncertain economic situation of the past few years is a clear, real and pragmatic example of the effect of this uncertainty, something known
Automating the loading of multiple database tables into SAS tables
When developing SAS applications, you can feed database tables into your application by using the libname access engine either by directly referring a database table, or via SAS or database views that themselves refer to one or more of the database tables. More on Automation with SAS: Let SAS write
How is MDM different from data warehousing?
Do you know how master data management and data warehouses are different? Jim Harris explains.
Tripping over text icebergs
Recently I backed into a hotel parking spot after returning from a customer dinner. It was dark and rainy, and I was tired from traveling. My mind wandered until I heard a shrill “BEEP BEEP BEEP” coming from my rental car. I looked down at the dashboard’s rear-view camera, and
The emotional landscape of data science
Neil Harbisson is completely colour-blind. He sees the world in greyscale. But that does not mean that Neil does not experience colour. Since 2004, he has worn an electronic ‘eye’ that turns the colours into sounds by wavelength. He now experiences the world as a series of tones. He dresses
Feeding the hungry, after a flood
In the aftermath of a natural disaster, most people want to help by donating supplies, money, etc. And then it becomes a matter of logistics - getting all those donations to the people who need them. We recently had several days of rain and flooding in North Carolina, and I
Visualize a design matrix
Most SAS regression procedures support a CLASS statement which internally generates dummy variables for categorical variables. I have previously described what dummy variables are and how are they used. I have also written about how to create design matrices that contain dummy variables in SAS, and in particular how to
How to configure Oracle client for successful access to Oracle databases from SAS Viya
SAS Data Connector to Oracle lets you easily load data from your Oracle DB into SAS Viya for advanced analytics. SAS/ACCESS Interface to Oracle (on SAS Viya) provides the required SAS Data Connector to Oracle, that should be deployed to your CAS environment. Once the below described configuration steps for
The Moneyball effect moves from the field to industry
Billy Beane attained fame in baseball and analytics circles long before Brad Pitt portrayed him in the 2011 film Moneyball. In fact, Beane was making quite the name for himself prior to Michael Lewis’s 2004 book of the same name. It’s no overstatement to claim that, as general manager (GM)
Using loops in your SAS graph code
If you're a SAS programmer, you have likely used loops in your SAS code to make life easier from time to time. In this blog post, I demonstrate a few ways you can use loops to do clever things in your graph code. Perhaps even the old dogs can learn
Determining the size of a SAS data set
When developing SAS® data sets, program code and/or applications, efficiency is not always given the attention it deserves, particularly in the early phases of development. Since data sizes and system performance can affect a program and/or an application’s behavior, SAS users may want to access information about a data set’s
Yes, non-European Union firms – the GDPR applies to you, too
Todd Wright explains what GDPR means and shows how SAS can help you prepare for it.
Wholehearted Living #GEHFM
This May is Global Employee Health and Fitness Month. For #GEHFM the Work/Life Center is embracing the theme of Wholehearted Living. Wholehearted living is a concept developed by writer and research professor, Dr. Brené Brown. Wholehearted living can be seen in behaviors that promote physical and emotional self-care, gratitude, compassion, mindfulness and
Adopting and embracing digital transformation using win-win
Regular readers will be aware that in my last post, I made the case for a win-win approach for mature organisations to successfully deliver digital transformation. I think there are many ways we could explain this. Established organisations infrastructure may be old, or their work processes may be complex and
Will your next car be made in China?
Building cars is towards the top of the manufacturing hierarchy - some countries are even known for the cars they build. If you want a good quality car, you probably think of Japan. If you want a stylish sports car, you probably think of Italy. If you want a diesel
Master data usability: Understanding the issues in syndicating master data
David Loshin explains 4 struggles of syndicating master data across the enterprise.
Visualize an ANOVA with two-way interactions
There are several ways to visualize data in a two-way ANOVA model. Most visualizations show a statistical summary of the response variable for each category. However, for small data sets, it can be useful to overlay the raw data. This article shows a simple trick that you can use to
Diagonal tick values
Fitting of long category values on a x-axis is usually a challenge. With SAS 9.4, the SGPLOT procedure tries to fit the values by first splitting the values at white space to see if the values will fit in the space available. This normally works well for a small number
Financial Crime Risk Management - Taking Action to Support Anti-Money Laundering
In my first article, I looked at the main areas covered by the 4th Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Directive from the EU. This post covers the amendments to that directive introduced by the 5th AML Directive, and suggests how organizations can address the requirements of the two directives. The 5th AML Directive:
What’s all the buzz?
30,000 new employees start work today in one of SAS’ sweetest acquisitions to date. Bee Downtown, a North Carolina-based company using businesses in cities to help save honey bee populations, will install two hives on SAS world headquarters campus, bringing with them 30,000 - 40,000 new honey bees. Bee Downtown-sponsored
Your mapping toolkit tip #6 - Geocoding your addresses
You've got a database containing the addresses of all your customers ... but how can you plot them on a map or analyze them spatially? First, you'll need to convert the address into a numeric coordinate (latitude & longitude). SAS can do that ... with Proc Geocode! But before we
Use SAS to send an email that embeds a graph in the body of the email
When using the SAS® system to email graphics output, a common request is to use SAS to send an email in which the graphics output is embedded in the body of the email. This functionality is not available until the second maintenance release for SAS® 9.4 (TS1M2). If you are
Advanced ODS Graphics: Steps to think about when creating a graph
Today, I focus on the steps needed to make a graph that is composed of multiple heterogeneous components (in this case, dendrograms and a heat map).